On January 2021, the Clean Air Student Council hosted the Hong Kong Clean Air Conference under the theme Pollution and Policies. The conference featured icebreakers, talks from experts and critical thinking exercises. The Clean Air Student Council also had the opportunity to share some work done with its Marine Emissions Campaign through a video made which included a series of interviews conducted at the Central Pier.
The speakers invited were London-based environmental journalist, TEDx speaker, and author of Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution, Mrs. Beth Gardiner, and Hong Kong-based Environmentalist and Lead Strategist at Personalised Real-Time Air Quality Informatics System for Exposure – Hong Kong, Dr. Michelle Wong, to share their expertise and experience around tackling air pollution and opinions on related policies.
Students who participated in a writing competition launched earlier under the prompt of “Air Pollution Progress and Policies” were also invited as winners were presented at the end of the conference.
Speakers
Michelle Wong
Lead strategist on branding, marketing, and stakeholder engagement of PRAISE-HK -- world-leading air quality, and health mobile app system. With over 10-year long tenure working in a leading policy think-tank in Hong Kong and HKUST. A passionate storyteller with proven success in packaging scientific information into comprehensible messages and making impacts in evidence-based policy-making processes.
Beth Gardiner
Beth Gardiner is an American journalist based in London. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Time, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Yale Environment 360. These days, she focuses mainly on stories about environment, health and sustainability, but she’s written about everything from politics, education and feminism to food and the arts. Beth spent 10 years as a reporter for the Associated Press, based first in New York and then in London. Her AP assignments included traveling to Aceh, Indonesia, days after the tsunami there to cover its aftermath, flying on Tony Blair’s plane to write about prime ministerial trips to China, India and Washington, and reporting from the Middle East during a flare-up of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Beth has discussed her work on NPR's All Things Considered, WNYC's Brian Lehrer show, and the BBC's World at One, as well as on MSNBC, CBC in Canada, Sky News, ITN, LBC radio, and Al Jazeera English. She was a speaker at TEDx London at the Royal Festival Hall. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Society of Environmental Journalists both awarded grants to support Beth’s work on Choked, which is her first book.